Movie Review: Waves

Waves **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Trey Edward Shults.

Written by: Trey Edward Shults.

Starring: Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Tyler), Taylor Russell (Emily), Lucas Hedges (Luke), Sterling K. Brown (Ronald), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Catherine), Alexa Demie (Alexis), Clifton Collins Jr. (Bobby), Neal Huff (Bill).

 

Waves is a film about love and death and family. About guilt and redemption. It’s a film that isn’t afraid to go big – to be a giant, messy film that amps up the emotions, and the music, to 11 and just go for it. It’s a film that reminds me of some of John Cassavetes work – like say Love Streams – or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. It goes for that level of pain and heartbreak. It is a major step forward for writer/director Trey Edward Shults, whose two previous films Krisha and It Comes at Night, also focused on a family in intense times – but this one takes it to a completely different level.

 

The film is basically split into two parts. The first part focuses on Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr. – proving once again, after Luce, that he’s one of the best young actors in the world). Tyler is a star high school wrestler – the son of another wrestler, Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) – who has made a success of himself, and pushes his son to do the same. This comes out in destructive ways – like when his shoulder pain turns out not to be a minor issue, but something serious – requiring surgery, and probably means he will never wrestle again. Tyler, who is 18, hides this from his parents – and keeps wrestling – with bad results. Things get even worse when his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) tells him she’s pregnant – and after some back and forth, decides she wants to keep the baby. To say Tyler handles it poorly would be an understatement – as this half of the movie hurtles toward a tragic conclusion. The second half of the film focuses on Tyler’s younger sister, Emily (Taylor Russell) and how she navigates the aftermath of what happened in the first. Her family is falling apart, she is ostracized at school, etc. Then she meets Luke (Lucas Hedges) – and the pair fall in love, the kind of sweet teenage love with caught a glimpse of in the first half of the film between Tyler and Alexis, before it all falls apart. There is death and tragedy in the second part though – but a different kind, in a different register.

 

The film opens with a literally dizzying shot – shot from inside a car, the camera rotates around and around, watching Tyler and his friends as the cruise through the streets. You almost get the sense that something bad is going to happen – but it doesn’t here. Propelled by the music, it’s really a freeing moment in the film – showing these kids letting loose. A lot will happen in cars in the film – often set to music, which is the backbone of the film (not just the song choices, but the typically wonderful work by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the score) – but it won’t always be so freeing. It’s in a car, where things come to a head between Tyler and Alexi, it’s in a car where Tyler will go out of the house drunk, on the night he makes one horrible decision after another, it’s in a car where Emily and Luke will go on their sweet dates – and later on a road trip to see a figure from Luke’s past. The cars take them everywhere – good and bad.

 

The film is one with the emotions dialed way up – and the style matches that. The work by cinematographer Drew Daniels is magnificent – it glides through these people and their lives – the colors are deep and saturated. He plays with aspect ratio as well – the screen becomes narrower as Tyler’s world collapses around him. The colors change as well – there is a gentler, softer color in the second half of the film that befits the relationship we see at play there.

 

The film is about the mistakes we make – and the consequences of those mistakes. Some of the mistakes are obvious – like Tyler’s – and some are less so, like the ones his father makes. They all have an impact though – and those impacts reverberate among those closest to us. It is about learning to forgive – and having the ability to move on. This doesn’t undo those mistakes – you still have to pay for them, as Tyler will have to do, and how his father has to in a different way. But it’s up to us how we about doing that.

 

It’s also just an emotionally powerful – and emotionally exhausting film. All of Shults stylistic tricks work here – he isn’t doing them just to show off, but to deepen the emotions. And part of that is due to the performances – all of which hit the right notes. Harrison Jr. is a star – and Hollywood will surely realize that soon. Taylor Russell has a less showy role – it’s a quieter performance, as Emily as a quieter more internal character – but it’s just as good. We expect good work from the likes of Lucas Hedges, Sterling K. Brown and Renée Elise Goldsberry- and none of them disappoint.

 

Waves is an example of the type of film I love – the type in watch a promising filmmaker finally makes good on that promise. Both Krisha and It Comes at Night were very good films – but you see a great filmmaker in there, honing their craft. In Waves, it all comes crashing out of Shults – and results in one of the year’s best films.

Movie Review: It Comes at Night

It Comes at Night **** / *****

Directed by: Trey Edward Shults.

Written by: Trey Edward Shults.

Starring: Joel Edgerton (Paul), Christopher Abbott (Will), Carmen Ejogo (Sarah), Riley Keough (Kim), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Travis), Griffin Robert Faulkner (Andrew).

 

Trey Edward Shults wasted little time making his follow-up to last year’s remarkable Krisha – one of the year’s great debut films. That film was almost an emotional horror film, about a woman returning to her family for the first time in years, trying to bury her demons (addiction and mental issues) and reconnect – and failing spectacularly. With It Comes At Night, he has made a more traditional horror film – although it’s still a film about family more than anything else – a horror film without a villain, but almost unbearable tension. It may well frustrate viewers looking for something bloodier, or that spells everything out for you – which this film refuses to do. While it is more clearly a genre picture, where Krisha was not, it isn’t exactly like most other horror films.

 

Almost all of the film takes place in a boarded up house deep in the woods – and those woods themselves. Father Paul (Joel Edgerton), mother Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and 17 year old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) – live there by themselves, and follow very strict rules about going in and out of the house, and two door system that creates an airlock of sorts to protect them from the outside world. We in the first scene why such precautions are necessary – as Paul and Travis take an elderly man, coughing blood, into the woods – Travis tells him “I’ll miss you Grandpa”, before Paul wraps him in a carpet, shoots him in the head, and sets the body on fire. A stranger arrives at the house – as strangers always do in these movies – but the precautions protect the family, and Paul is able to capture the man trying to break in. This is Will (Christopher Abbott), who will tell Paul that he’s just trying to look after his own family – his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and young son Andrew – living themselves in an abandoned house some 50 miles away. Paul decides to help Will and his family – bringing them all back to his place. But Paul never really does trust them – there are some things in their story that could be the kind of innocent mistake anyone could make, but could also mean that he’s being lied to. All we know about the outside world at this point is that some sort of disease has wiped out most people – so while Paul may be paranoid, he also may well he right.

 

Shults is a talented filmmaker, and while It Comes at Night isn’t quite as visually daring as Krisha was (that film, had strange elements that recall Lynch, Cassavetes and Kubrick in one film), it is more consistent this time around. He makes great use of the darkness in the film – especially around the nightmare sequences we see Travis experience, or his moments when he spies on the other in the house (not in a perverted way). Even when they are outside – and they’re only every outside in the day – things are exactly bright – the trees cast shadows over everyone and everything out there.

 

The cast is uniformly excellent, even if for the most part, everyone is paying archetypes more than complicated characters – the stern, strict father, the more loving, sympathetic mother, the possibly dangerous stranger, his beautiful, alluring wife, the precocious child. The film is seen through the eyes of Travis, although he’s probably the quietest of the characters, observing everything, and saying very little – not even revealing the nightmares that haunt him to anyone.

 

It Comes at Night lacks the complexity of Shults’ Krisha – mainly because we don’t have a character like that at the center of this film this time around. That was a remarkable character and performance. This is more of a director’s showcase – a sustained act of building and maintaining tension for 98 minutes, because there’s barely a moment in the film that isn’t intense, that you aren’t on the edge of your seat. That Shults quietly is able to sneak some of emotions into the film when you weren’t looking – so that the ending of the film, although inevitable, still hits you harder than you thought it would, is remarkable – and shows that Shults, who still isn’t even 30, truly is one of the indie filmmakers to watch for in the future.

 

It Comes at Night is not quite what I was expecting from the director of Krisha, and it won’t be quite what audiences thinking they’re going to see a horror film are likely to expect either. In this case, that’s a good thing. I cannot wait to see what Shults does next.

 

Movie Review: Krisha

Krisha

Directed by: Trey Edward Shults.

Written by: Trey Edward Shults.

Starring: Krisha Fairchild (Krisha), Olivia Grace Applegate (Olivia), Bryan Casserly (Logan), Alex Dobrenko (Alex), Chris Doubek (Dr. Becker), Billie Fairchild (Grandma), Robyn Fairchild (Robyn), Victoria Fairchild (Vicky), Atheena Frizzell (Atheena), Augustine Frizzell (Augustine), Chase Joliet (Chase), Rose Nelson (Rose), Trey Edward Shults (Trey), Bill Wise (Doyle).

 

The barebones plot description of Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha makes it sounds like any number of Sundance films. An aging woman, Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), who has struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, returns to her family after years away, now apparently clean, and over the course of a long, Thanksgiving day, the past is drudged up, and she threatens to spiral out of control again, even as she struggles to put things right. The fact that it is inspired by the filmmaker’s own family – most of whom are playing a version of themselves (though not Krisha herself) in the film, makes it sound even more Sundance-y – the type of film that gets raves when it plays there, and then shrugs when it opens a few months later. But Krisha is a different sort of film altogether (maybe that’s why it didn’t actually premiere at Sundance – but at SXSW instead). This is no quirky family, who appears dysfunctional, but deep down, everything is normal, where eventually everything will turn out okay, with hugs and tears right before the lights come out. It is a portrait of a woman who simply cannot stop or help herself – and the pain this causes the rest of her family. And it is an unflinching portrait. It is also, a brilliantly assured directorial debut from Shults – who has made a film that feels kind of like what would happen if John Cassavetes, Robert Altman and David Lynch collaborated to make a film – which, of course, means it really is a true original.

 

In the title role, Krisha Fairchild delivers one of the best performances you will see this year. She is an actress who has worked sporadically for years, while also dabbling in other professions as well, who at the age of 65, has been given the role of a lifetime, and she makes the most of it. She did the film as a favor to her nephew – Shults, the writer/director – but her talent is evident in every frame. She is the lone professional actor in the cast – and she certainly does outshine the rest of them – but she also fits in with them as well. When she first blusters into the house, harried, late, with a giant wheeled suitcase, making excuses, everyone is at first kind to her – but also, clearly holding back. Over the course of the day, she will see and sense the glances exchanged by those around her, none of whom seem completely able to meet her gaze. She has a painfully awkward conversation with one of the 20-something year old young men in the family, Trey (the director himself), although the exact nature of their relationship isn’t spelled out until the final few minutes of the movie. She’s trying very hard to connect with him – but he isn’t having it – as he sits there, painfully quiet, and barely looking at her, as she goes on and on.

 

These scenes  - of Krisha trying very hard to fit in – and increasingly intercut with other scenes of Krisha – as she retreats to the backyard for a cigarette, and more and more often, going into a bathroom, and taking some pills – and later a smuggled bottle of wine. As the film progresses, the realism of the opening scenes gives way to something more surreal – Shults, who edited the film himself, does a masterful job at placing us in Krisha’s warped perception as things spiral out of control. He also does a great job of infusing something as mundane as a turkey cooking in the oven, with undeniable tension.

 

The movie isn’t perfect. Even if Krisha plays out in ways not wholly anticipated in terms of these kinds of drug addict returns home stories, it’s not that far off either in terms of the broader strokes. At just 82 minutes long, the final scenes feel rushed – as if Shults could have spent a little bit more time in the company of this family. Perhaps the best scene in the movie takes place in these moments – a conversation between Krisha and her sister Robyn (played by Krisha’s real life sister Robyn), in an upstairs bathroom, where all the years of pain, torment and betrayal come spilling out. The movie could have perhaps used a little bit more of this.

 

Yet, Krisha is overall, a stunning debut feature from Shults – and marks him as one of the most promising directors to emerge in quite some time. In Krisha Fairchild, he found the perfect actress to anchor his film – the pain and torment is evident on her face throughout. Fairchild has been around for while, but seems to know the type of role she got her is rare – and makes the most of it. It is one of the best performances of the year, in a film by a director I am sure we will hear more from in the future.